A Haring, a Yeats, and a quiet life in Maple Ridge.

Among the one hundred and fifty lots crossing the block on Friday, June 5 is a Keith Haring acrylic on canvas—four figures skateboarding, the early-Eighties iconography in full flight—that has carried the same documentation since it left the Fun Gallery on East 11th Street more than four decades ago. It is the most significant Haring to come to a Canadian auction in some time.

Around it, in the same sale, hang a hundred and forty-nine others. A small Jack B. Yeats from County Galway, painted on the same lake where his brother once counted nine-and-fifty swans. A Fairfield Porter from Long Island, made the year before the painter died. A quiet Group of Seven portrait from the estate of a British Columbia collector whose name almost no one outside Maple Ridge had heard until this winter.

This is a walk through five of those lots, and the lives they have already lived.

The Fun Gallery occupied a single storefront on East 11th Street in Manhattan, between First Avenue and Avenue A. It was opened in 1981 by an actress named Patti Astor, who would within a year or two appear in Wild Style and Beat Street, the first two feature films about hip-hop and the visual culture coming up around it, and her partner Bill Stelling. The neighbourhood at that time was hard. Most of the commercial galleries that mattered in New York were uptown or in SoHo and had no time for the young painters living and working in the East Village. Astor opened Fun because the work needed a place to be shown, and because she liked the people making it.

Across the four years the gallery stayed open, she gave first or early commercial shows to Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, Futura, Lady Pink, Fab 5 Freddy, and a dozen others. She ran the place on a shoestring. She extended credit. She fed the artists when they needed it. When Fun closed in 1985, the East Village had begun its long tilt toward gentrification, and several of the painters she had shown were already among the most photographed in New York.

Lot 29 of our Spring Fine Art Auction came out of her personal estate, with documentation that traces it directly back to those years on East 11th Street. The painting is acrylic on canvas. Four figures skateboarding—two in profile, two seen from above—drawn in the confident, unbroken line Haring had been refining since his subway-drawing days, and in the red, white, and black palette he would keep returning to for the rest of his short career. Estimate $650,000–$750,000 CAD.

Astor died in 2020. Haring died in 1990, of AIDS-related complications, at thirty-one. Major Harings from the Fun Gallery years almost never come to auction in Canada, and when one does, the question a buyer worries about first is whether the picture is right. With this canvas, that is the first question that can be set down.

A few lots earlier in the catalogue is something genuinely rare. Lot 17 is small, sixteen by ten inches, and at first you are not certain what you are looking at. It is leather, dark and worked, with a thick rim that flares outward and the texture of hide that has spent years in sunlight: an African leather war shield, of the kind that turned up in Western estates and curiosity shops through the postwar decades. Painted across the front in black felt-tip marker, over a quick ground of red, black and white paint, are figures in the linked-hand pose Haring drew thousands of times, and the spiky-crowned head and bone-letter signature of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The two of them must have made it together. Basquiat and Haring were close in those East Village years—both at the Fun Gallery, both at Tony Shafrazi by 1982, both photographed constantly—but their collaborations on canvas are uncommon, and on objects like this one almost nonexistent.

The shield comes through the Patti Astor estate as well, with a second certificate of opinion from Diego Cortez. Cortez was the curator who, the year before, had put together New York/New Wave at MoMA P.S.1—the show now usually credited with putting Basquiat in front of the international art world. He was one of the era’s gatekeepers, and his signature on the back of a piece carries weight in the market.

Estimate $400,000–$600,000 CAD. We expect interest from a small number of serious downtown-NY collectors and one or two institutions. This is the sort of object that disappears for a generation after it sells.

There is a single-owner thread running through the catalogue almost without announcement.

Theresa McMillian lived in Maple Ridge, British Columbia. We do not know much more than that. We know she was the owner of record for two of the strongest Canadian lots in our June 5 sale: a Frederick Horsman Varley oil portrait of a young woman in a green dress, signed by the painter at lower left and inscribed on the back of the canvas, in pencil, “Emie in her early 20’s”; and an Alfred Pellan oil on panel from 1960, a meandering abstract in many colours, signed and dated by the painter.

Varley was a member of the Group of Seven, though he is remembered as much now for his portraits as for the landscapes the group made famous. The dignity and stillness of the faces he painted—the way he treated his sitters as people rather than emblems—is matched by very few Canadian painters of his generation. Emie, in this picture, is unidentified beyond the inscription. The painter clearly knew her well.

Pellan trained in Paris through the 1930s, working alongside the Cubists and Surrealists who would come to define European modernism. He returned to Quebec in 1940, took up a teaching post in Montreal, and helped pull a generation of Québécois painters into international conversation in the years just before Borduas and the Refus Global. The 1960 abstract from Theresa McMillian’s estate is the work of a painter at the height of his powers, in the middle of one of the most generative decades in Canadian art.

We have a partial estate inventory and almost nothing about the woman herself. What we have is the work she chose to live with. A Group of Seven portrait. A Pellan abstract. An eye that knew exactly what it was looking at.

Varley estimate $16,000–$24,000. Pellan $15,000–$20,000.

A small oil on board, nine by fourteen inches, signed lower right and titled, in the painter’s hand on the back: Evening Trees, Coole Lake.

The painter is Jack Butler Yeats, brother of William Butler Yeats, and the lake is Coole Park in County Galway. Coole was the estate of Lady Augusta Gregory—the playwright and one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre—and the Yeats brothers were there throughout their working lives. In the autumn of 1916, looking out at the same lake the painter brother would later return to, the poet brother wrote the poem that begins:

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.— W. B. Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole”

For much of his career, the painter brother stood somewhat in the poet brother’s shadow. He eventually became Ireland’s most celebrated twentieth-century painter—the first non-classical Irish artist whose work entered the Tate’s collection—and a major Jack Yeats can sell for several million pounds in the right London room.

This is not that picture, and the estimate is not that estimate. Evening Trees, Coole Lake is quiet and intimate, the kind of small panel Yeats made by the hundred and sold to friends in Dublin through his long-time dealer Victor Waddington. The labels on the back of the board read like a footnote in Irish art history: Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin; and a partial stamp from Mira Godard Gallery, the dealer who handled the Canadian secondary market for Irish and British painting through the 1960s and 70s. Estimate $50,000–$70,000 CAD.

For a Yeats at this size and with this paperwork, that is an estimate worth thinking about.

A page later in the catalogue, at the same estimate as the Yeats, is something very different in temperament: a Fairfield Porter oil on board from 1973, titled, in the painter’s hand on the back, Cumulonimbus.

Porter painted his own life. He lived for most of his career in Southampton, Long Island, with his wife—the poet Anne Channing Porter—and their five children, and he painted them: sitting at the breakfast table, walking on the beach, reading in the late summer light, year after year, across three decades of New York School ferment that he watched closely but did not entirely join. He was also one of the most respected American art critics of his generation, writing for The Nation and ARTnews through the 1950s and 60s. He was close to Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler; several of them sat for him over the years.

Cumulonimbus is small—sixteen by twenty inches—a wooded lake under the kind of high summer clouds the title names. It was painted two years before Porter’s death. The label on the back of the board reads Art Emporium, Vancouver. How a late Porter from Long Island travelled west and ended up in a Canadian estate is the kind of provenance question this trade is built to answer; we do not yet have the full chain in hand.

Porter’s market has historically lagged the de Koonings and Frankenthalers of his generation, though painters and critics have argued for decades that it shouldn’t. He is, in the phrase the painters use, a painter’s painter.

Five lots is most of this article and not nearly the sale.

The catalogue holds two David Milnes ($15,000–$20,000 each), watercolour and oil from the painter who almost single-handedly taught Canadians to take watercolour seriously as a primary medium. A Marc-Aurèle Fortin Quebec landscape. A small Toller Cranston painting—people forget that the figure skater spent the second half of his life as a serious painter, working from a house in San Miguel de Allende, where he eventually died. A Molly Lamb Bobak drawing made in the Netherlands in the spring of 1945, weeks after she became the first woman appointed an official Canadian war artist. Small ceramics and lithographs by Picasso. Prints by Miró and Braque. Two Otto Dix etchings from his Weimar Berlin years, when he was still inventing the visual language of German political art. Paintings by Allan Sapp, Cree, of Saskatchewan, and Alex Janvier, of Cold Lake First Nation—two of the most important Indigenous painters Canada has produced. A Hortense Mattice Gordon from the Painters Eleven, the Toronto-based abstractionists who briefly tried to drag postwar Canadian painting into the New York School. A Nicholas de Grandmaison portrait of a sitter whose name has not survived in the records.

Sales like this one are built from decades of private collecting. The Haring left a downtown New York storefront in the early 1980s and went into a closet, then a vault, then a will. The Yeats was bought from a Dublin dealer and crossed the Atlantic at some point we have not yet pinned down. Theresa McMillian hung a Group of Seven portrait in her house in Maple Ridge for so long that the back of the canvas has gone amber where it touched the wall.

On the morning of June 5, all of it will be in the same online room, and the gavel will move quickly. Pre-registration is open through the auctioneer’s site. Between now and then, we will be taking calls, returning condition reports, and walking serious buyers through any lot in detail—by phone, by appointment, lot by lot. The Haring will draw the headlines. But like every sale we run, this one will be built from all of it: the marquee, the quiet, the unexpected, and the work that arrived from collectors whose names we are only beginning to learn.